Using pure water to fill tank

Fleet Washing
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Hey all. I’m looking into buying a high flow RO/DI filter to fill my buffer tank for rinsing off cars at a dealership. It’s multiple locations across the metroplex all with water spigots to use.

I have a single xero pure system I thought about running into my tank, but the output is only around .5gpm, which wouldn’t cut it.

I’m only seeing RO/DI systems that are only capable of 3gpm it seems. Which is much better, but I’m wondering if anyone else has a better solution for this they’ve used?

@Infinity i saw on WCR using a similar system but only with DI tanks, the water here is pretty hard though, 150+ TDS

Hope everyone is off to a good new years!

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Who is asking you to rinse cars with RO/DI? When I did car lots (a few thousand cars per week) we would just knock the dust off and then two guys would use shamwow rags and give it a quick towel dry.

I am surprised to see someone going after car lots anymore. There’s just not much to be made there anymore.

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They didn’t ask for pure water but I was looking into it, to minimize the drying process. It’s 1000+cars a week for $2/car, and I’ve never done 100k+ in a year before so I’m going after it.

It’ll be broken down into 500 cars, 2 days a week year round.

If you did a few thousand per week it does sound like I could learn a thing or two from you! Our current plan is to just rinse them down and wipe them with some premium microfibers as you said. It’s 5 different dealerships across the metro

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What tip/psi would you use to knock of the dust? I have 8gpm 3000psi green tip I was thinking of throttling down halfway or using a much larger orifice.

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Just get a holding tank for your clean water and pump out of there…and setup up the 3 gpm xero to continue to feed the tank?

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Someone told me it takes them 8 hours to fill up 275g from their holding tank. This would be impossible for me as 275g wouldn’t get me halfway through the job. So I’m not sure if this would work for my case :confused: but keeping it topped up with the 3gpm RO makes me think it’s possible. I need about 120g for each of the 5 locations.

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Should take a couple hours to fill 275 gallons with 3 gpm ro/di machine. I have one of those….been doing waterfed for a long time with our pressure washing. They put out decent amount of clean water.

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To be transparent, when I say I washed lots I mean that I was one of the rag-wielding grunts. But, I will be happy to give you a basic rundown of how we did it. This was also well over a decade ago so my earlier comment wasn’t meant to offend. If I recall correctly, they were charging between $0.70 to $1.00 per car back then.

They ran a four man crew. One guy driving the truck, one guy with a little 2.5gpm cold water machine, two guys with the biggest shamwow rags they sold at the time. Washer would take off down a row and we rag grunts would follow behind drying one half of the car each. We would slalom our way down the row. It goes incredibly quick. I would imagine probably about 30 seconds per car to wash and dry.

I like your idea of using RO/DI and not having to worry about the drying so much. We would really only dry the upper half of the cars anyhow. It was quite literally just knocking the dust off and a super fast towel dry and on to the next lot. Was a pretty miserable job but I was in college at the time and it kept me fit.

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I could be wrong, but I imagine most guys washing car lots are using very small machines, like 2.5 or potentially even smaller. You don’t really need much flow to give them a quick bath. The detail guys do the hard work before it ever makes the lot. You’re just knocking the last week or two of dust from sitting off.

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A decade seems like yesterday to me :sweat_smile:

That’s the boat I’m in now, but if I can knock these out efficiently to where I can still run my business full time for the rest of the week, it would be a dream come true. The last 2 years I’ve done 50-60k a year with 80% being residential work. So this will really change things for me.

30 seconds per car would be perfect. I was hoping for around 45-60s for the person drying, because we’d be done with the 550 cars around 7hrs of working time.

And the client has been clear about how it’s just a very simple rinse with water, they just want us to make sure the glass isn’t so spotty, and the darker colored cars need a liiitle more attention because the spotting appears more than the lighter cars.

Ideally, we’re going to knock this out from 10pm start the machine to 4am head home, so we can not have our weekly schedule so messed up.

We were thinking ball valve cracked open to rinse the cars, and bunch of larger style microfibers.

Again we have a 8gpm residential skid with some decent power, so I’m not sure if I should run with a large orifice green tip, throttle machine down, or simply buy a separate trailer dedicated to this job. Drawback being that I’d need somewhere else to store it, but whatever it takes.

Do you think it’s easier to have one guy driving the truck through the lot? We were just going to park it in separate sections and use our 200ft of pressure hose, probably add an extra 100’ section. Here, check this picture

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This is an example of one of the 5 locations of the route. Blue highlighted area is water source. Probably park next to that and rinse row by row, then move the truck down low to finish the remaining cars, and head out to the next one.

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Yeah, in that example I’d just setup in the center and stretch hose to one side then the other. Overnight would be sweet. We were daylight washing and that can be a pain when you have people crawling the lot.

You can try the 8gpm but I have a feeling it’s going to wear you out. It’s just overkill for what you’d be doing. Give it a try and see if it works for you. If it were me, I’d probably throw together a skid and a separate pickup for just that. Put a little machine on there with as big of a supply tank as you can and get after it.

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On the big lots, absolutely. Saves your guys a ton of wear and tear dragging the hose. Can stretch out just what you need and have him match the washer’s pace. Just creeping down the row. I washed in the OKC metro and those car lots are massive.

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I’m exhausted just reading this, lol.

If you’re dead set on going RO/DI, build or buy a 3gpm filtration system, and find yourself a 3.5 or 4 gpm gear or belt drive machine (so it’ll pull from a buffer).

But personally, it seems like there should be easier ways to hit your 100k goal through either better paying residential work, or contracting condo/townhome jobs.

Not trying to brag, but I did a little over $120k in sales last year working solo, 4-4.5 days a week, ~5-7 hours a day, march through November. Having a couple of good sized commercial accounts made a big difference. Previous 5 years I’ve done anywhere from 80-112k, with a similar time investment. (I also still do a fair amount of window cleaning which has a lower hourly rate. If I was 100% power washing I’d like to see my gross at $150k+)

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I thought there would be easier ways too but I’ve tried everything with residential pressure washing. Spent 10s of thousands on different platforms/different marketing agencies, 5k+ door hangers a month, yard signs, door knocking, etc.

But this is where I’ve found myself for the time being. This year I also plan on adding a couple different services or leaning more into window cleaning.

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Window cleaning can promote pressure washing and gutter cleaning, or many exterior services.

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Sounds like a tough market :grimacing:. I’ve put very little (besides patience) into marketing my business. But it was a slow build to get where I am now.

Hopefully the car lot washing works out for ya. Lemme know if you’ve got any other questions I can give my 2¢ on.

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Yeah that’s why I was thinking of adding some more services so that they can all compliment each other. I was about to get a ford transit to run them out of, since my PW truck is full with the washer and window cleaning equipment.

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I was going to ask how to build my own 3gpm filtration system. I do have the normal small xero pure for 1 WFP, could I add a booster pump to this and get that 2-3gpm? Or do you know what I should do?

Would it be a good idea to just run a RO filter? I’ve heard people say here that DI water leeches the minerals from the seals of your pump. But I’m not sure if the RO will lower the tds enough? I figure it would be easier to get a higher flow from just RO.

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Just use your ro/di cart……you can add a booster, you might get 2 gpm, just depends. With pure water you shouldn’t have any TDS, gauge should read 0000 or close to it. I love pure water cleaning…pretty amazing and efficient.

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I see some use a transit for their setup……stores everything too. Me personally the fumes from the bleach I wouldn’t like……but I see them setup for pw and WC.